Letter of the Law

We have been working through the alphabet with employment law topics and the dreaded X week has arrived, but fortunately there is a 2014 FLSA case involving X-rays that demonstrates the difficulty for an employer of defeating FLSA coverage. In Gashlin v. International Clinic Research, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida denied the employer’s motion for summary judgment asserting that Wendy Gashlin was not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act. Ms. Gashlin, a clinical research employee, claimed she worked more…

One of the themes in my posts and on Currents generally is not missing out on easy liability avoidance opportunities. I want to make a stronger statement than the employment lawyer’s usual, “Hey if you do X and Y, you can minimize employee liability,” though certainly that is true and valuable. Rather: EMPLOYERS MISS OUT ON EASY LIABILITY AVOIDANCE OPPORTUNITIES, thereby diverting time, money and energy from building their organization and bettering their goods and services. Here and here are recent examples. These are lost…

Many employers will have noted the decision last month where a federal court in California held that approximately 65,000 class members could maintain a class action against J.C. Penney’s under California law. That lawsuit challenges the company’s policy that employees forfeit accrued vacation benefits on termination. The issue in this decision was whether the plaintiffs met the commonality tests that allow a matter to be advanced as a class action rather than as a series of individual actions – individual actions that likely would not…

This week U is for under utilized – the readily available liability prevention tools that, in our estimation, employers most often neglect to use to their advantage. The extra step. Before terminating an employee with a medical issue, that is. As we have written here and here, much FMLA and ADA liability is preventable if you will methodically work through the communications steps that years of case law tells us courts are looking for. The sooner you start, the sooner you can finish. I…

This week’s letter T is for trade secrets, and five things every employer should know about them. Nearly everybody has them. As I wrote here, if there is information you would not want your competitor to have, you should at least be talking to your lawyer about whether they may be trade secrets and, if so, what do you need to do to protect them. The key point of trade secret law is that, in order to have the legal protections of a…